Istvan followed it, not in any real pursuit but because that beech also gave him cover from the east. The ermine, by then, was gone, only tiny tracks in the snow showing where it had run.
Szonyi had found cover behind a pine not far away. He glanced toward Istvan, who paused for a moment, taking his bearings. Then Istvan pointed in the direction from which he thought the suspicious noise had come. Szonyi considered, then nodded. They both crawled forward again.
Now they advanced separately, each one taking his own path to the target. If something happens to me, Szonyi will get back with the word, Istvan thought. He hoped the converse was in Szonyi's mind. He hoped even more that the two of them were right.
Have to be close now, went through his mind a few minutes later. He looked around for Szonyi, but didn't see him. He refused to let that worry him. Despite the stories told, silently killing a man wasn't that easy. Had something gone wrong, he would have heard the struggle. So he told himself, at any rate.
He started to come out from behind a birch, then froze in the sense of not moving as opposed to the sense of being cold. In the snow in front of the tree were tracks- not the little marks of an ermine, but those of a man on snowshoes. The Unkerlanters were very fond of snowshoes, and Istvan didn't think any of his own folk had come this way lately.
A scout, he thought. Doesn't look like more than one man. Just a scout, snooping around to see what we're up to. That wasn't so bad. He vastly preferred it to coming across the forerunners of a brigade about to sweep down on him. Maybe the rumor of attack Hevesi had brought was nothing but a rumor. The Unkerlanters have as much trouble putting enough men into this fight as we do. Different reasons, but as much trouble.
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than the Unkerlanter soldier came out from behind a tree a couple of hundred yards away. Istvan got only a glimpse- other trees blocked his view and gave him hardly any chance for a good blaze.
He wasn't too inclined to take one anyhow; he had more sympathy for Swemmel's men than he'd had when the war was new. But, a moment later, the Unkerlanter crumpled with a yowl of pain- Szonyi, evidently, had a better spot and less sympathy. "Back now!" Istvan called, and headed off toward the redoubt. If Swemmel's men had hoped to catch the Gyongyosians hereabouts napping, they'd just been disappointed.
Captured by the Algarvians the summer before, retaken by Unkerlant only a couple of months earlier, the starting point from which Marshal Rathar had sent out his attacking columns to ravage the redheads further, Durrwangen was under Algarvian attack again.
Now that it was too late to do him any good, Rathar understood the lesson Mezentio's men had taught him. "We just pushed them back here and there," he said to General Vatran. "We didn't pinch in behind them and destroy them, the way they did to us so many times."
"You wanted to make them fight in front of rivers and such," Vatran said. "We thought they were panicked, or else turning coward, when they wouldn't stand and fight, but fell back instead."
"Never trust an Algarvian retreat," Rathar said solemnly- mournfully, when you got down to it. "They saved their men, they concentrated them- and then they went and hit us with them."
"Disgraceful, deceitful thing to go and do," Vatran said, as if the Algarvians had pulled off some underhanded trick instead of one of the more brilliant counterattacks Rathar had ever seen. He would have appreciated it even more had it not been aimed at him.
"We were almost up to Hagenow," he said, pointing to the map. His voice grew more mournful still. "We'd driven east all the way up to the border of Grelz. And then, curse them, the redheads bit back." He kicked at the floor of the battered bank that housed his headquarters. "I knew they'd try. I didn't think they could bite so hard, or with such sharp teeth."
As if to underscore that, more eggs burst in Durrwangen, some of them close to the headquarters. He didn't have to worry about splinters of glass flying through the air like shining knives to pierce him; by now, he doubted whether any building in Durrwangen kept glazed windows. He knew perfectly well that the headquarters didn't.
"Shall we go down to the vault?" Vatran asked.
"Oh, very well." Rathar's voice was testy. He seldom suggested such a thing himself; he was too proud for that. But he wasn't too proud to acknowledge common sense when he heard it.
Down in the vault, everyone- commanders, subordinate officers, runners, crystallomancers, secretaries, cooks, what have you- was crowded together as tightly as sardines in a tin. People didn't even have oil to lubricate the spaces between them. They elbowed one another, trod on one another's toes, breathed in one another's faces, and, without intending to at all, generally made themselves as unpleasant for one another as they could.
Above them, around them, the ground shuddered as if in torment. And that was only from the sorcerous energy the Algarvian eggs released when they burst. If Mezentio's mages decided to start killing Kaunians… Turning to Vatran, Rathar asked, "Are our special sorcerous countermeasures in place?"
Special sorcerous countermeasures was a euphemism for the peasants and condemned criminals Unkerlanters had available and ready to slay to blunt Algarvian magics and to power spells against the redheads. Rathar was no more comfortable than anyone else- always excluding King Swemmel, whose many vices did not include hypocrisy- about calling murder by its right name.
Vatran nodded. "Aye, lord Marshal. If they try and bring the roof down around our ears with magecraft, we can try to hold it up the same way."
"Good," Rathar said, though he was anything but sure it was. He wished the Algarvians hadn't turned loose the demon of slaughter. It might have won them the war if Swemmel hadn't been so quick to adopt it for his own, but Swemmel, as he'd proved in the Twinkings War, would do anything survival called for. Now both sides slaughtered, and neither gained much by it.
More eggs fell, these closer still. Ysolt the cook, who'd been steady as a rock in the cave by the Wolter River even when the fighting for Sulingen was at its worst, let out a shriek that tore at Rathar's eardrums. "We'll all be killed," she blubbered. "Every last one of us killed." Rathar wished he were convinced she was wrong.
And then Vatran asked him a truly unwelcome question: "If they try to throw us out of Durrwangen, can we stop 'em?"
"If they come straight at us out of the north, aye, we can," Rathar replied. But that wasn't exactly what the general had asked. "If they try to flank us out… I just don't know."
Vatran replied with what the whole Derlavaian War had proved: "They're cursed good at flanking maneuvers."
Before Rathar could say anything to that, Ysolt started screaming again. "Be silent!" he roared in a parade-ground voice, and the cook, for a wonder, was silent. He wished once more, this time that he could control the Algarvians so easily. Since he couldn't, he answered Vatran, "Up until a few days ago, I was hoping for a late thaw this spring, so we could grab all we could before everything slowed to a crawl. Now I'm hoping for an early one, to do half- powers above, more than half- our fighting for us."
Vatran's chuckle was wheezy. "Oh, aye, Marshal Mud's an even stronger master than Marshal Winter."
"Curse the Algarvians," Rathar ground out. "We had them on the run. I never dreamt I was fighting circus acrobats who could turn a somersault and then come forward as fast as they'd gone back."
"Life is full of surprises," Vatran said dryly. An egg burst close enough to the headquarters to add a deafening emphasis to that. Chunks of plaster slid between the boards that shored up the ceiling and came down on people's heads. Ysolt started screaming again, and she wasn't the only one. Some of the cries were contralto, others bass.